[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 148 (Monday, September 16, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5496-S5497]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today on the Senate floor 
for ``Time to Wake Up'' speech No. 253.
  If you felt like the heat this summer was particularly brutal, you 
were not imagining things. July was the hottest month ever recorded, 
according to NOAA. The Secretary General of the World Meteorological 
Organization noted, ``July has rewritten climate history, with dozens 
of new temperature records at [the] local, national and global level.''
  NOAA says 2019 is on track to tie for the second hottest year on 
record. Overall, the past 5 years are expected to take the title of the 
hottest 5-year period in recorded human history.
  This rapid heating of our Earth is wreaking havoc on our environment 
and public health. Here is a list from NOAA that you can find on their 
website, Selected Significant Climate Anomalies and Events, July 2019, 
all around the globe.
  In 1 day--1 day--the Greenland ice sheet lost 12\1/2\ billion tons of 
ice, melted into the sea. Throughout the world, from France to India, 
to the Arctic Circle, temperature records shattered. On July 4, the 
people of Anchorage, AK, experienced their first ever 90-degree day. At 
one point in July, excessive heat warnings asked nearly 170 million 
Americans to avoid the outdoors and take shelter in air conditioning, 
where available.
  According to Deke Arndt, head of climate monitoring for NOAA, these 
record heat waves are, and I quote him, ``almost entirely due to 
climate change.'' Jack Williams, a professor with the Center for 
Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin, told NBC news the 
``[h]eat waves of today are going to be the normal events of 
tomorrow.''
  Where there is heat, there is apt to be fire. In the United States, 
wildfires rage on a remarkable scale. According to a new report by the 
major data analytics company CoreLogic, over 8.7 million acres burned 
in the United States in 2018. That is about the land area of the 75 
largest cities in the United States combined.
  This summer, the Arctic experienced a record-setting wildfire season. 
Places that have not traditionally burned in parts of northern Canada, 
Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia were engulfed in flames visible from 
space.
  In this map, the North Pole is about here. This looks down at Alaska 
here and Russia here, the Siberian Arctic. As you can see, fires were 
everywhere. Guillermo Rein of Imperial College London told Wired:

       Arctic fires are rare, but they're not unprecedented. What 
     is unprecedented is the number of fires that are happening. 
     Never before have satellites around the planet seen this 
     level of activity.

  As of August 28, fires cut across more than 6 million acres of 
Siberian forest and 2.5 million acres of Alaskan tundra and forested 
land.
  These forests aren't just scarring the Arctic landscape; they are 
also releasing tons more of carbon dioxide, causing more climate 
change. Researchers estimate the Arctic fires have released more than 
180 million tons of CO2. For comparison, my home State of 
Rhode Island was responsible for around 9.75 million tons of carbon 
dioxide through our fossil fuel combustion in 2016--roughly 20 times as 
much, just from these fires.
  NASA scientists are also tracing soot from these fires. The soot 
absorbs sunlight and warms the atmosphere; and when the soot settles 
and covers Arctic ice, it absorbs more sunlight and speeds up the 
melting and the warming. Once these forces are set in motion, the 
vicious cycle of warmer temperatures, wildfires, ice melt, and then 
ever warmer temperature is hard to break.

  Far from the Arctic, fires rage in another iconic ecosystem: the 
Amazon. So far this year, the Amazon region has seen over 40,000 fires. 
Unlike the Arctic, our changing climate is less to blame for the 
devastation than humans.
  Again, natural forest fires in the Amazon are rare, but warmer and 
dryer conditions under climate change do make the fires larger and 
longer lasting than in the past. The true culprit in Brazil is manmade 
deforestation, accelerating under the new Brazilian President. 
Enforcement against illegal logging and clearing has declined. In the 
first 6 months of this year, over 1,300 square miles of Amazon forest 
were destroyed in Brazil, sometimes at a rate of more than three 
football fields' worth of forest per minute.
  The journal Science Advances warns that deforestation in the Amazon 
is close to a threshold beyond which the rainforest will undergo 
irreversible changes. Without the healthy forests of the Amazon, the 
world will lose one of its most important terrestrial carbon sinks--
areas that naturally absorb carbon from our atmosphere. The Amazon 
captures about 5 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. A 
2015 study published in Nature shows that the amount of carbon dioxide 
the Amazon absorbs is already falling, has fallen since the 1990s by 
nearly one-third.
  In Brazil, the air has gotten so thick with smoke that in Porto 
Velho, a city in the upper Amazon basin, over 400 children landed in a 
local hospital with respiratory problems in the first 3 weeks of 
August. Public health officials and resources are overwhelmed. A 
pediatrician in Porto Velho said: ``Every year we have some fires and 
issues with smoke, but this was the worst year of them all.''
  The tragedy in Brazil is reminiscent of forests burned in Southeast 
Asia to make way for palm oil plantations. Sumatra, Borneo, and parts 
of Malaysia saw over 70 percent of their peat forest lost to manmade 
deforestation. In Indonesia, nearly 106,000 acres burned in just the 
first 5 months of this year.
  I am from the Ocean State. Wildfires, of course, don't burn in the 
ocean, but unprecedented heat waves are surging through our seas, 
laying waste to coral reefs in much the way wildfires ravage forests. 
The harm to the Amazon rainforests and to the Arctic steppes from 
wildfire finds an aquatic echo in the death of the Great Barrier Reef 
and reefs all over the world from climate-driven, unprecedented ocean 
heat waves.
  Our willful blindness to these obvious calamities playing out on 
God's Earth, which are largely due to malign influence from the fossil 
fuel industry and its great armada of front groups it uses to do its 
dirty business, needs to stop. The willful blindness has to come to an 
end. From the Equator to the Arctic, an Earth aflame will have life-or-
death consequences for generations to come.
  Even our news media are turning their collective backs. In late 
August, as these fires raged, Media Matters chronicled that not one--
not one--of the five influential Sunday news shows covered them. They 
are basically political gossip shows. Indeed, Media Matters showed 
cable news devoted to wildfires in the Amazon only 7 percent of the 
time they devoted to the Notre Dame Cathedral fire. In other speeches, 
I pointed out how the royal baby has swamped climate coverage in our 
pathetic media.
  Whether in Indonesia or Brazilian rain forests or Arctic tundra, the 
costs of the corporate greed and paid-for political ignorance that are 
stopping us

[[Page S5497]]

from acting are on full display. Our planet suffers as a consequence. 
We avert our eyes in the pursuit of cheap fossil fuel. But nothing 
comes without a cost, and our debt is coming due. Pope Francis drove 
home this point in a recent Sunday address, saying: ``We have caused a 
climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself, 
including our own.''
  Our world is on fire. I am sorry to quarrel with Billy Joel, but this 
time, we did start the fire. If that can't get the attention of my 
colleagues in Congress, I do not know what can.
  We must wake up.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________